Gov. Cuomo: please call off the SHSAT, absolutely critical especially during a pandemic.

The letter below was sent to Gov. Cuomo on Monday via his webform; feel free to send your own thoughts on the matter.  

November 23, 2020

Dear Governor Cuomo, 

We, the undersigned organizations and individuals, write to request the issuance of an Executive Order to suspend the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT) for the specialized high schools in New York City. 

The Hecht-Calandra Act requires that admissions to the specialized high schools be solely and exclusively determined by scores on the SHSAT, which is administered by the NYC Department of Education usually in late October/ early November every year.  Nearly 30,000 students take the SHSAT for approximately 5,000 seats across 8 specialized high schools. The test is administered on campus at these schools.  Obviously this year with the pandemic and particularly now with the increasing infection rates, in-person testing is infeasible and the DOE has not announced how it plans to administer the test. 

The Mayor hinted at offering the SHSAT online at the weekly radio address last week. However, not every student has access to an adequate device or reliable internet connectivity, making the online option discriminatory. In addition to the inequitable access to the digital platform, many of our students are traumatized by the pandemic, having lost loved ones to the disease, facing a new economic reality resulting from parental job loss, or living with the anxiety of a parent who is an essential worker. These traumas disproportionately affect historically marginalized students.

Because the Mayor does not have the power to change the admissions to the specialized high schools, we call upon you to issue an Executive Order suspending the SHSAT this year and allowing the Chancellor of the NYC DOE to develop an alternative method of admissions to the specialized high schools. And given that our estimate of the costs for test administration is approximately $3 Million per year, suspending the SHSAT is also prudent in the face of the fiscal crisis.  We believe this is the only equitable path forward.  

Sincerely, 

Organizations

Alliance for Quality Education

Class Size Matters

Coalition for Asian American Children & Families (CACF)

Community Education Council District 14

Community Education Council District 16

Community Inclusion & Development Alliance

Education Council Consortium

EduColor

El Puente

Families for Real Equity in Education (FREE)

IntegrateNYC

Masa

MORE-UFT (Movement of Rank and File Educators)

NYC Kids PAC

NYC Opt Opt

S.E.E.D.S., Inc. <www.seedswork.org>

Teens Take Charge

Amazon deal collapses - and the community wins

There have been loads of news stories and opinion pieces written over the last few days about the decision of Amazon to pull out of the deal to site their second headquarters in Long Island City. The reality is that most community activists as well as those in nearby Queens neighborhoods vehemently opposed the deal because there was absolutely nothing in it for them, except even more rapidly rising rents, more congestion, less affordable housing and the loss of three potential sites for schools.   (I co-wrote an oped shortly after the deal was announced on the likely negative impact on the neighborhood's already overcrowded schools with parent activist Sabina Omerhodzic in Gotham Gazette here.)

Long Island City is already the fastest growing neighborhood not only in NYC but in the entire country, and it badly needs infrastructure improvements to serve its residents.  Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo tried to bypass the City Council and the community through a top-down executive action, similar to Trump's attempt to force the construction of a wall on our borders, by refusing to put the development proposal through the usual public input process called ULURP.

In the only check to their authority, Sen. Mike Gianaris who represents the community, was appointed  by Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins to the Public Authorities  Control Board that would have to approve the deal.  This represented a huge hurdle as Gianaris was passionately opposed to the agreement and is even more powerful now that he's the Senate Deputy Majority Leader and helped engineer the Democratic takeover of that body.

In any case, the agreement that the Mayor and Governor made with Amazon offered residents nothing but more pain, while giving nearly $3 billion in subsidies and tax breaks to the corporation that could instead have been used for infrastructure improvement -- indicative of how the Mayor views economic development as trumping the needs of residents for a better quality of life and uncrowded schools for their kids.

As many have pointed out, the reality is that there are lots of tech companies that are expanding fast in NYC without being offered any tax breaks, subsidies, or city-owned property.  Apple, Google and Facebook are all hiring additional staff and renting buildings in the city, because young people want to live here. 

Contrary to the claims made by the Governor and others, I  doubt any NYC elected official who criticized the deal risks losing  his or her seat over this. It was just announced that Amazon will pay nothing in federal taxes despite a profit of $11.2 billion last year.  An indication of how the political tides have already turned, de Blasio appears eager to switch sides and blame Amazon for the deal's collapse - not any of its opponents. As he writes in today's NY Times,

Amazon’s path in New York would have been far smoother had it recognized our residents’ fears of economic insecurity and displacement — and spoken to them directly.

We just witnessed another example of what the concentration of power in the hands of huge corporations leaves in its wake. Let’s change the rules before the next corporation tries to divide and conquer.

And let's hope the Mayor and Governor have learned their lesson and change the calculus by which they make decisions, by no longer eagerly giving away billions of dollars and city property to wealthy corporations while ignoring the needs of the communities they are supposed to serve.

.

The very real threat of privatization to our public schools, at the state and national levels

Gov. Cuomo   photo: AP

Several people have asked for a copy of the privatization presentation I gave at the meeting of the Westchester- East Putnam PTA meeting on Saturday.   It is below.

While Trump and DeVos represent a huge threat to our public schools, so do Gov. Cuomo and the NY State Senate.  Cuomo has proposed expanding funding to charter schools this year, eliminating the charter cap in NYC,  and entirely erasing the foundation formula in future years -- a formula developed to send more state aid to high needs districts after the state's highest court concluded that our school funding system was unconstitutional.

Betsy Devos  photo:Jim Watson / AFP - Getty

Meanwhile, the NY State Senate is likely to support all of these proposals and also to approve a voucher-like bill called the Education Tuition Tax Credit bill, which would siphon off millions of dollars of state funds to private and parochial schools and give huge tax breaks to billionaires at the same time.  More on this below.

The hedge fund community and other members of the pro-privatization and charter school lobby made up the largest donors to the GOP members of the NY State Senate in the November 2016 elections -- and have also been some of the largest contributors to Cuomo's campaigns in past years.  As he gears up to run for President, he may be counting on their support once again.

Privatization Westchester Pta 3.4.17 by Leonie Haimson on Scribd

Resist privatization! presentation tomorrow in Westchester, Education Justice marches and great debate on charters

1.     Leonie Haimson will be speaking on the national and state push to privatize public education tomorrow Saturday, March 4, 2017 at the Westchester-East Putnam PTA Advocacy Breakfast. The event is free; just RSVP to magerbxv@gmail.com

What: Westchester-East Putnam PTA Advocacy Breakfast
Where: The Education House, 5 Homeside Lane, White Plains, NY
When: Saturday, March 4, 2017, begins at 8:30 AM; I will be speaking at about 10 AM.

2.       There is also a People March for Educational Justice happening tomorrow Saturday in NYC and throughout the state.   Governor Cuomo has proposed a terrible budget that essentially eliminates foundation aid after this year – which was created after the CFE lawsuit to make education funding more equitable and send more resources to high-needs districts. His budget would also significantly increase funding to charter schools and raise the charter cap in NYC, as well as make NYC pay more for charter school rent or force us to squeeze even more charter school students into our already overcrowded school buildings.

NYC already pays over $1.7 BILLION annually to charter schools, and over $40 million a year for their rent. To spend any more would be a supreme hardship and would drain even more funds from our public schools. Meanwhile, it was announced today that Success Academy charters is renting Radio City Music Hall for their annual test prep rally, and last year spent over $68 million for their new headquarters in Manhattan.

For more information on when and where to meet across the state to March for Educational Justice and against privatization, please check out http://www.aqeny.org/march/ In NYC, the march starts in front of Trump Hotel at Columbus Circle at 9:30 AM.

3. On Wednesday Leonie had the pleasure of attending an IQ2 debate on charter schools. Please check out the video here and below.  The debaters included Gary Miron, Professor in Evaluation, Measurement, and Research at Western Michigan University and Julian Vasquez Heilig, Sacramento State Professor and a founding Board Member, Network for Public Education vs. Jeanne Allen, CEO of The Center for Education Reform and Gerard Robinson, Resident Fellow, AEI & former Florida Commissioner of Education.

The proposition under debate was whether charter schools are overrated.  The audience members voted at the beginning and the end.  After the debate was over, 21% changed their mind to agree with the proposition compared to 9% changed their mind in the other direction, for a total of 54% to 40% who now believed charters were overrated. More on the debate here and here.  Please watch if you have the time to see if you will change your mind!

Sign a petition to Cuomo and the Regents now about teacher evaluation!

In response to Mayor Bloomberg's pressure to eliminate seniority protections for teachers , Gov. Cuomo has introduced legislation to impose a new teacher evaluation system next year.

It is good that he has resisted the mayor's pressure, since study after study shows that teaching experience matters in terms of student outcomes, and installing an alternative system of layoffs based largely on arbitrary ratings would undermine the professionalism of the teaching force and the quality of instruction in NYC schools.

Yet the legislation that the Governor has proposed that would rush into effect a new teacher evaluation system next year would do more harm than good., as many experts, including the National Academy of Sciences and the Economic Policy Institute, have warned of the potentially damaging consequences of implementing test-based teacher evaluation systems.

This danger was also revealed in a recent New York Times column that showed how an excellent NYC teacher is likely to be denied tenure and leave teaching altogether – a major loss to her school and its students – because of the unreliability of the test-based system. Thus, any new teacher evaluation system must encompass multiple sources of evidence, including peer and principal input, parent and student surveys, and alternative assessments that include student work.

Moreover, the Regents Task Force on Teacher and Principal Evaluation is almost exclusively composed of teachers and administrators, and does not appear to have a single public school parent on it. Nor does it include any experts on statistics and testing.

Please sign our letter, co-sponsored by Class Size Matters and Time out From Testing, urging the Gov., the Regents, Commissioner Steiner and the Legislature, with a copy to Michael Mulgrew of the UFT, to delay implementing any new teacher evaluation system until we can be sure that it is thoughtfully devised and carefully piloted, with numerous safeguards to ensure that excellent teachers are not mistakenly denied tenure or other job protections.

We also ask that parents be appointed to the taskforce, along with independent experts on testing and statistics who are not under contract to either SED or DOE.

After signing, please forward to your friends and post to your Facebook page.

thanks!